"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)

Friday, April 30, 2010

Amnesty International today called on the Cuban authorities to end harassment of independent journalists following a month in which several reporters were arbitrarily detained and intimidated for criticizing the government.

“Journalists who try to work independently of the state-owned media outlets in Cuba are being targeted with repressive tactics and spurious criminal charges - and this clampdown on freedom of expression appears to be intensifying,” said Susan Lee, Amnesty International's Americas Director, ahead of World Press Freedom Day on 3 May.

Journalist Calixto Ramón Martínez Arias remains in detention after being arrested on 23 April by security officials who broke into the house where he was covering a memorial service for a prisoner of conscience. Orlando Zapata Tamayo had died two months earlier after several weeks on hunger strike in protest against the plight of prisoners of conscience in Cuba.

Another journalist described the campaign of intimidation waged against him as “psychological torture”. Yosvani Anzardo Hernández, the director of an online independent newspaper, was detained on 24 April and questioned for over six hours over anti-government graffiti found in the city of Holguin.

Meanwhile, news agency director Carlos Serpa Maceira was subjected to intimidation and harassment by the Cuban authorities when he tried to cover the weekly march by the activist group Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White) on three consecutive weekends in April.

Members of the Damas de Blanco have been repeatedly harassed and intimidated by government supporters, and their weekly demonstrations were forcibly broken by police on at least two occasions.

"Criminal charges, or other forms of harassment and intimidation, must not be brought against independent journalists, human rights advocates or political dissidents as a result of their legitimate exercise of freedom of expression," said Susan Lee.

There are currently 55 prisoners of conscience detained in Cuba, most of them serving long sentences for criticizing the Cuban government and advocating basic human rights. Among them are several independent journalists.

Several articles of the Cuban Constitution and Penal Code are so vague that the authorities have been able to use them in a way that infringes freedom of expression. The Cuban State also maintains a total control of broadcast media and the press, while access to the internet is heavily restricted.

"As a result of these restrictions on freedom of expression, Cubans are unable to share independent information without facing direct repression from the authorities," said Susan Lee.

"Restrictions on access to the internet should be lifted and censorship of websites containing information and views contrary to government policies must be eliminated."

Amnesty International has urged the Cuban authorities to review all legal provisions that unlawfully limit freedom of expression and to release all prisoners of conscience immediately and unconditionally.

Carlos Alberto Montaner today received and dedicated the "Juan de Mariana Award for an exemplary trajectory in the defense of freedom” to Orlando Zapata Tamayo. Below is the speech translated to English.

By Carlos Alberto Montaner

In 1980, shortly after making a dramatic exit from Cuba, the magnificent writer Reinaldo Arenas collected in a book his more combative articles and essays and titled it The Need for Freedom.

It was a shout. Reinaldo felt the need to be free. Human beings need to be free. He was asphyxiating in Cuba. He lived in sadness, fear and indignation. None of those three emotions is pleasant, and sometimes they twisted in his heart to the point of desperation.

After finding exile, Reinaldo felt profound relief and said something that was both wondrous and painful: for the first time, he had shown his true face. He had “unmasked” himself and felt the warm sensation of being himself, without the fear that such an act might bring him punishment and alienation.

In totalitarian societies, the pain of not being free and moving about in disguise becomes somatic in various ways, from a knot in the throat to a diffuse malaise expressed by assorted neurotic behaviors.

What is freedom? It is the ability we have to make decisions based on our individual beliefs, convictions and interests, without external pressures.

Freedom is choosing the god who best fits our religious perceptions, or choosing no god if we don’t feel the spiritual need to transcend.

Freedom is fearlessly offering our affection and loyalty to the people we love, or to the groups with which we feel a kinship.

Freedom is choosing without interference what we want to study, where and how we wish to live, the ideas that best reflect our vision of the social problems or the ideas that best seem to explain them.

Freedom is selecting the artistic expressions that please us the most, or, conversely, rejecting them without consequences.

Freedom is being able to undertake or renounce an economic activity without reporting to anyone, beyond the formalities established by law.

Freedom is spending our money as we see fit, acquiring the goods that satisfy us and disposing of our legitimate properties. Without freedom, the creation of wealth is weakened to the point of misery.

José Martí, the illustrious journalist who generated Cuba’s independence, contributed another definition: “Freedom is the right of every man to be honest, and to think and speak without hypocrisy.”

Tyrannies deny us the right to be honest when they force us to applaud what we detest or reject what we secretly admire.

When Cubans parade, shouting slogans they don’t believe in, they are not honest. When they applaud the leader they abhor or laugh at the nonsense he spouts, they are not honest.

That simulation creates in us an uncomfortable psychological dissonance. When we sacrifice our honesty, when we renounce our internal consistency to avoid harm or obtain a privilege, we feel “dirty” and internally ashamed. Hypocrisy is a behavior that wounds the person who practices it and repels the person at whom it’s directed.

But there’s more. At some point in the evolutionary process, when human beings abandoned the rule of instinct and began to guide themselves by reason, they discovered the agonizing process of making decisions by constantly shuffling the prevailing moral values, material interests, and psychological impulses.

To make such decisions, it was necessary to become informed. Totalitarian violence tries to prevent people from becoming informed. Why become informed if all the decisions are made by the State and all the truths have already been discovered?

In Cuba, there are numerous police brigades whose task it is to remove parabolic antennas, find satellite phones, confiscate banned books, and deny Internet access to anyone who is minimally independent. I cannot think of a more wretched activity.

When Spanish socialist Fernando de los Ríos asked Lenin when he was going to institute a regime of freedoms in the fledgling Soviet Union, the Bolshevik answered with a question loaded with cynicism: “Freedom for what?”

The answer to that is manifold: freedom to investigate, to generate wealth, to seek happiness, to reaffirm the individual ego in a human tide, all of them tasks that depend on our ability to make decisions.

The history of the West is the history of societies that have progressively expanded the horizons of free people.

Gradually, they took away from the monarchs and the religious and economic oligarchies their exclusive powers to decide in the name of the whole. The poor and the foreigners attained their rights. The same happened with the races considered to be inferior, with the women, with the people who were alienated because of their sexual preferences. Slavery was finally eradicated.

It is possible to narrate the long, historical trek of human beings as the constant adventure of our species in the quest for a gradual increase in the number of people given the right to make their own decisions.

Sometimes, the exercise of that ability assumes heroic proportions. Some weeks ago, Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo decided to die of hunger and thirst to protest against the injustice and abuses of the dictatorship. All he had to defend his dignity as a human being was his life—and he gave it. To him, to his sad memory, with deep emotion, I dedicate these words.

The above text was a speech by the author, upon receiving the “Juan de Mariana Award for an exemplary trajectory in the defense of freedom,” Madrid, Spain, April 30, 2010.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

"Things in Cuba are not well at all, but I am going to continue this struggle to the death or until whatever they want happens; I will continue to support the Ladies in White, even if they continue to beat us, because what they want is for us to be afraid and we are not going to allow that to happen." -Dania Virgen García (blogger, independent journalist sentenced to 20 months in prison)

The crackdown on independent journalists is intensifying, with three cases of journalists being jailed, arrested or summoned in the past few days. The journalist who has been jailed is Dania Virgen García of Primavera Digital and CubaNet, who was given a 20-month sentence on 23 April. Her case brings the number of journalists imprisoned in Cuba to 25.

Arrested at her home in the Havana suburb of San Miguel del Padrón on 22 April, García was tried and convicted in less than 48 hours and was taken to the women’s prison known as the “Manto Negro” (Black Veil) because of its bad reputation. The regime’s haste to “pass justice” appears to have been due to the municipal elections held on 25 April

The charges on which García, 41, was convicted have yet to be confirmed, but she supported and participated in the marches staged by the Ladies in White, a group formed by the mothers, wives and sisters of political prisoners whose activities have been suppressed by the authorities in recent days.

Condemns prison sentence, arrest of a second journalist and calls for end to repression

Miami (April 26, 2010)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today denounced the conviction in Cuba of an independent blogger and the arrest of another journalist in separate incidents last week and called for the immediate release of all imprisoned journalists and an end to repression by the government.

On April 22nd Cuba’s political police arrested independent journalist and blogger Diana Virgen García (http://daniavirgengarcia.blogspot.com) whose blog, launched in January, reports on the violence and repression against other independent reporters on the Caribbean island. García is also a human rights activist who openly supports the Ladies in White movement, a group that the government has suppressed and prevented from demonstrating on several occasions.

García was taken to court the day after her arrest and sentenced to one year and eight months in prison on charges that had not yet been made known. The president of the Center for Human Rights and Democracy Brigade 2506, Segundo Miranda, brought the fact to light, while Cuba’s official press – the newspapers Granma and Juventud Rebelde – did not report on it.

IAPA President Alejandro Aguirre, editor of the Miami, Florida, Spanish-language newspaper Diario Las Américas, declared, “We continue seeing the same story of restriction of freedom of expression in Cuba,” adding, “while we wait for word on the fate of the famous blogger Yoani Sánchez, who was harassed on a number of occasions, other women and men are being persecuted by a government that threatens, restricts, censors, tries and convicts offhandedly.”

With the imprisonment of García, the only woman to date, there are 26 journalists behind bars in Cuba. Many are in poor health, a fact which has set off protests calling for their release; independent reporter Guillermo Fariñas, who has been on hunger strike for several weeks, is among those held prisoner.

Arrested in Holguín on the morning of April 24 was Yosvani Anzardo Hernández, editor of the independent newspaper Candonga. His wife, Lourdes María Yen Rodríguez, reported that two State Security officers came to their home in the town of San Germán and arrested her husband. The family does not know the motive for his arrest. In September 2009 Hernández spent 15 days in jail after his home was raided and his electronic equipment seized.

The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, Texas, repeated the organization’s call for the unconditional release of imprisoned journalists, in particular those who for humanitarian reasons should have their rights respected.

The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere. For more information please go to http://www.sipiapa.org

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

12 young environmental activists from Huruma arrested while demanding equitable treatment before the Nairobi City Council. Please send letters requesting their release to the Ministry of Justice at ps-justice@justice.go.ke.

Members of Human Rights City Kenya and Garbage collectors in Starehe Constituency are appealing for quick assistance to their members, the members Taka ni Pato, Mwamko wa Vijana, Starehe social congress and Macho ya Mazingira among others, who were arrested on April 23, 2010 at 1:00 am and detained at Huruma Police Post and later taken to City court on the morning of April 23, 2010.

The arrests were malicious and meant to intimidate members who engage in environmental issues in order to earn their livelihood through garbage collection.

The following is the list of those arrested and still detained in Industrial Area Prisons

They were charged with illegal dumping yet they have certificates from the Nairobi City Council for waste collection and a dumping site for disposing the garbage. The following are breadwinners of their families and two of them left little children in the house without any care.This arrests are common in the area, with the charges always being illegal dumping, touting and being members of illegal sects (Mungiki).

Note that on April 9, 2010 Peter Kariuki Nyaga and Josphat Mureithi Nyaga were arrested, detained and later taken to court charged with illegal dumping and are currently detained at Kamiti Maximum Prisons

WE ARE NOW APPEALING TO ALL CIVIL SOCIETY MEMBERS AND HUMAN RIGHT DEFENDERS TO COME TO THE RESCUE OF THESE YOUNG INNOCENT KENYANS BY PROVIDING THEM WITH A LAWYER AND CASH BAIL.

Friday, April 23, 2010

It outrages me but sadly does not surprise me that 2 months after prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after 82 days on a water only hunger strike, in which prison officials denied him water for more than two weeks, to protest the brutal and inhumane treatment against Cuban prisoners in general that the dictatorship and their apologists continue to smear the name of a good man that can no longer defend himself. Orlando Zapata Tamayo was an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience. Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience after carefully examining his case over a period of months on January 29, 2004. This is Amnesty's description of Orlando Zapata Tamayo:

Orlando Zapata Tamayo is a member of the Movimiento Alternativa Republicana, Alternative Republican Movement, and a member of the Consejo Nacional de Resistencia Cívica, National Civic Resistance Committee.

He has been arrested several times in the past. For example he was temporarily detained on 3 July 2002 and 28 October 2002. In November 2002 after taking part in a workshop on human rights in the central Havana park, José Martí, he and eight other government opponents were reportedly arrested and later released. He was also arrested on 6 December 2002 along with Oscar Elías Biscet3, but was released on 8 March 2003.

Most recently, he was arrested on the morning of 20 March 2003 whilst taking part in a hunger strike at the Fundación Jesús Yánez Pelletier, Jesús Yánez Pelletier Foundation, in Havana, to demand the release of Oscar Biscet and other political prisoners. He was reportedly taken to the Villa Marista State Security Headquarters. He has not been tried yet, but the prosecutor is reportedly asking for three years’ imprisonment for “desacato”, “desordenes publicos”, “public disorder”, and “desobediencia”.

He has reportedly been moved around several prisons, including Quivicán Prison, Guanajay Prison, and most recently, Combinado del Este Prison in Havana. According to reports, on 20 October 2003 he was dragged along the floor of Combinado del Este Prison by prison officials after requesting medical attention, leaving his back full of lacerations.

“Regardless of what political model you embrace, I have no doubt that in our time our future belongs to those who are willing to responsibly embrace pluralism, openness and freedom. Your choice is to act and survive, or to resist and crumble.”

Reflecting on the situation in Cuba were for more than 50 years one party and the Castro brothers have rejected pluralism, openness, and freedom in Cuba we can say that the Island is a material realization of the above statement. The dictatorship resists change and Cuba is crumbling both physically and spiritually.

Cuban democrats are struggling for pluralism, openness, and freedom using non-violent means in the face of a brutal and violent of regime. There are two recent examples that demonstrate the dictatorship's nature. The death of prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo on an 82 day water only hunger strike on February 23. Cuba’s Ladies in White in March 2010 observed the 7th anniversary of their loved one’s imprisonment with silent marches over seven days during which they were subjected to harassment, detentions by state security, and brutal beatings. Some of them suffered broken bones.

Nevertheless, the women continued to march over the seven days demonstrating their courage and commitment.

Recalling this reality, we ask for concrete actions to be taken.

We call on democrats from around the world to continue to demonstrate their solidarity with their Cuban brothers and sisters, and if they have not in the past to begin to do so.

We call on the dictatorship in Cuba to release all of Cuba’s political prisoners; apply international human rights standards into the law; end communist monopoly control of political life recognizing both opposition parties and independent civil society; and finally hold free and transparent elections with international monitors.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Horrible. My prayers and thoughts are with President Lech Kaczynski, Anna Walentynowicz, and all those who lost their lives in Russia while honoring the victims of Katyn. Requiescant in pace. My condolonces and prayers for their families. Poland the world mourns with you.

There is the crime itself: the murder of the Polish officer class on the orders of Josef Stalin and the denial of the crime for a half century. The film Katyn by Andrzej Wajda, son of one of the officers murdered on Stalin's orders at the Katyn forest directed it. A trailer is available below.

Among the dead, Anna Walentynowicz, dubbed the 'Godmother' of the Polish Solidarity movement. Her firing in August of 1980 at the Gdansk ship yard led to a series of strikes that paralyzed Poland and led to the formation of Solidarity. The men and women on the flight that crashed were people who sought to remember and not forget Katyn.

The movie Strike!(2007) is a fictionalized version of her story. Below a trailer for the film:

Thursday, April 1, 2010

"Tyrants tremble when they are faced with men who are willing to die for their ideas. After 60 days on a hunger strike, following the example of Christ's 3 days on Calvary which for centuries has been a symbol of human sacrifice, it is time to put an end to this disgusting atrocity through denunciations and pressure by the world community."*

Fidel Castro (on Irish hunger strikers Bobby Sands et al)

68th Inter-Parliamentary Union Conference September 15, 1981

On the face of it their lives could not have been more different. Other than being born on an island and the way they died their lives should be a study in contrasts. One was a nationalist and socialist revolutionary who embraced an armed struggle against his oppressor and died on hunger strike demanding that his status as a political prisoner be recognized while the other an advocate of non-violent civic resistance to oppression and human rights activist would die on hunger strike demanding that his status as a prisoner of conscience be recognized and that prison conditions be improved. Although their methods of struggle while out on the street where extremely different within their respective prisons suffering beatings, and numerous indignities both sought to highlight the injustice they were suffering by means of a non-violent tactic: the hunger strike. Others have asked the question: what would you die for? They gave the world an answer that make tyrants tremble: Freedom.

Bobby Sands (pictured above far left) photo from Bobby Sands Trust

Bobby SandsRobert Gerard Sands born on March 9, 1954 in Rathcoole, a predominantly loyalist district of north Belfast in Northern Ireland. Bobby Sands at 16 years old was an apprentice coach builder but two years later he was intimidated by men with guns out of his apprenticeship and then four years later in June of 1972 he and his family were intimidated out of their home. At the age of 18 he joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and by October of 1972 Bobby was arrested and guns were found in his possession. He would spend three years in prison with political prisoner status released in 1976 he returned to his unit and continued to wage war on the British. Six months later arrested again in a car with a revolver with three other young men near the scene of a bomb attack on the the Balmoral Furniture Company at Dunmurry, followed by a gun-battle.

I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.

I believe and stand by the God-given right of the Irish nation to sovereign independence, and the right of any Irishman or woman to assert this right in armed revolution. That is why I am incarcerated, naked and tortured.

The British sought to treat the Irish Republicans and their violent struggle as a criminal matter ignoring the political dimension and stopped recognizing them as political prisoners. Add to that beatings and poor living conditions and the stage was set for the hunger strike. Bobby insisted on starting two weeks ahead of the others so that his death might secure their demands and save the others lives.

Amnesty International had documented how Orlando had been arrested several times in the past. For example he was temporarily detained on 3 July 2002 and 28 October 2002. In November of 2002 after taking part in a workshop on human rights in the central Havana park, José Martí, he and eight other government opponents were arrested and later released. He was also arrested on December 6, 2002 along with fellow prisoners of conscience Oscar Elías Biscet and Raúl Arencibia Fajardo.Dr. Biscet just released from prison a month earlier had sought to form a grassroots project for the promotion of human rights called "Friends of Human Rights." State security prevented them from entering the home of Raúl Arencibia Fajardo, Oscar Biscet, Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Virgilio Marante Güelmes and 12 others held a sit-in in the street in protest and chanted "long live human rights" and "freedom for political prisoners." They were then arrested and taken to the Tenth Unit of the National Revolutionary Police,Décima Unidad de La Policía Nacional Revolucionaria (PNR), in Havana.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo was released three months later on March 8, 2003, but Oscar Elias Biscet, Virgilio Marante Güelmes, and Raúl Arencibia Fajardo remained imprisoned.

My dear brothers in the internal opposition in Cuba. I have many things to say to you, but I did not want to do it with paper and ink, because I hope to go to you one day when our country is free without the Castro dictatorship. Long live human rights, with my blood I wrote to you so that this be saved as evidence of the savagery we are subjected to...

Zapata Tamayo was a man of the nonviolent civic struggle in its theoretical & practical aspects and expressed his heroic courage and intelligence - the most difficult in non-violent resistance in his direct action - the hunger strike until the death to achieve his objectives of basic freedoms. ...Zapata Tamayo had to suffer a double portion of this cruel discrimination for his humanitarian ideas and for being a person of color. ..."The government of Raul Castro exacerbated all its hatred, racial discrimination & torture until his death. This death is nothing less than an extrajudicial killing

Former Cuban prisoner of conscience Raúl Arencibia Fajardo now out of prison angrily denounced the government slanders of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a day after he heard the Cuban dictatorship's foreign minister libel the now deceased prisoner of conscience.

"I feel outraged by the lies of the Cuban foreign minister in Geneva and I am here to expose his lies. I knew Orlando Zapata for a long time in Cuba and I participated with him in many political activities...

The rest of the statement in Spanish is available in the video below:

Behind bars and faced with an assault on their dignity both men resorted to a civic nonviolent tactic - the hunger strike to defend their rights and expose injustice while demanding freedom. Bobby Sands writing in his Prison Diary on day 17 of his hunger strike stated it simply and powerfully: "If they aren’t able to destroy the desire for freedom, they won’t break you. They won’t break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart."

Sadly, the non-violent spirit of the hunger strike did not spread into the rest of the IRA movement and riots would eventually break out again in Northern Ireland which British forces were able to crush but for a period of time the hunger strikers forced the world to take notice at what was taking place inside of the prisons. In the Cuban struggle the opposition on the island has taken the decision to carry out a non-violent struggle. The Ladies in White, mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives have taken to the street and despite being brutalized, beaten, and bones broken continued to march for seven days during the Cuban Black Spring anniversary. It is a good sign that the opposition has the discipline and the toughness to stick to nonviolence and that is bad news for the dictatorship and good news for the Cuban people.

*By the time that the dictator made the above statement at leastthree men had died on hunger strike protesting the cruel and inhumane situation in the prisons and in the country their names and dates of their deaths: Carmelo Cuadra Hernández on April 21, 1969, Pedro Luis Boitel Abraham on May 25, 1972, Olegario Charlot Espileta on January 15, 1973